amendment of the law

Jack Dromey Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

It was a great Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, who once said that it would be “quite intolerable” for a modern economy and a compassionate society not to have at their heart social security and a welfare state. Quintessentially a one-nation Conservative, he was right. Sadly, the modern Conservative party is very different. We have a Chancellor who seeks to divide our nation between shirkers and strivers—now doers—and is often engaged in a grotesque demonisation of anyone on benefits in a system that can be cruel in its application and is not fit for purpose.

It is cruel in application on the one hand, as can be seen in the case of Bobby Busby in my constituency. His legs and pelvis were crushed in his youth, and he was on sticks, but he was passed fit for work, and his benefits were cut off. He fell into despair and could not stop crying. He went looking for his father, even though his father had died many years earlier. He retreated to his home and died of a heart attack. The benefits system is not fit for purpose on the other hand, as in the case of one Erdington family. Fiona was diagnosed with cancer of the spine last October, and applied for personal independence payment in November. Only now, four months later and as a consequence of my intervention, will she get a home assessment carried out by Capita. That is one of many cases that demonstrate a shambolic system.

I come from an upstanding working-class background where people believe that if you can work, you should work. It is also absolutely right that we should seek to reduce the benefits bill, but it is how we do it and what kind of society we want to live in that matters. Ours is therefore a very different approach. It involves building homes, because it is crazy that we spend 95p in every £1 that goes into homes as subsidy as opposed to bricks and mortar. The housing benefit bill is rising to £25 billion because of the biggest housing crisis in a generation and soaring rents. That is why Labour would build 200,000 badly needed homes a year to buy and rent.

Labour would get young people into work, paid for by the bankers’ bonus tax. One in four in my constituency is out of work. We must connect the two things, because I want to see many more young apprentices, such as those I saw at Carillion and Willmott Dixon: young men and women building the homes needed for the future. We would introduce free child care for three and four-year-olds so that families can balance work and home; and we would tackle in-work poverty, as we are seeking to do in Birmingham, by driving the agenda for the living wage. We want to see dignity at work, and more time for people to spend with their family, because they do not have to spend every hour of the day and night at work. That is better for employers and, crucially, it brings down the benefits bill.

Ours is a progressive approach that builds a stronger economy in a better society, tackling the price of failure. Ours is an approach that builds a sustainable recovery and one that works for working people. The Government boast of recovery—any progress is welcome, but this is the slowest recovery in 100 years. The Government are borrowing £190 billion more than they planned; there have been 24 tax increases; and working people are £1,600 a year worse off. A building worker I recently met in Kingstanding has had his wages cut by £80 over the past three years. It is little wonder therefore that when I was at the school gates at St Barnabas last Friday, a working mum came up to me and said, “I heard all week about recovery. Jack, what planet do they live on?”

It is not just falling wages; it is also growing insecurity in the world of work. The Bannions in my constituency are an excellent family with a disabled son. The dad has been made redundant three times in the past three years—each new job was on lower pay and was more insecure—and sadly, there are millions like him who live in a twilight world of zero-hours contracts and agency work.

In conclusion, this is a Government who are simply out of touch, and the Tory chairman’s patronising poster said it all. I used to play bingo when I was a young man. I drank too much beer and my waistline suffered as a consequence. We have excellent bingo halls and pubs throughout Erdington, but beer and bingo are not the summit of working people’s ambitions.

Erdington has the 14th highest unemployment level of any constituency in the United Kingdom. It is a constituency of high need, with pockets of severe deprivation, but it is rich in talent. There is Angela Maher, the mother of two disabled kids, who sings in a local choir; Linda Hines, who has built 200 homes in Witton Lodge; and Maurice Weston, a former industrial worker, now a volunteer at Slade school who has written an excellent history of Slade school. There are working-class scientists and working-class engineers from Erdington working in Jaguar Land Rover. There is an airline pilot and outstanding artists such as Jim Allmark and a collective of artists with whom he works. There is our very own Billy Elliot, Amanda Cutler, the chair of the Castle Vale pool user group. She is a mum of two, living on the Vale, who danced with the Royal Ballet in “Swan Lake”.

This is a Government who are out of touch, oblivious to the consequences of their actions, divorced from the reality of ordinary people’s lives and who simply do not get it. We want to see a stronger, fairer, better economy that works for all, but that will not happen under this Government. That great task will fall to the next Labour Government.

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). I thank him for his valiant attempt to explain his party’s economic policy using real-life examples, but he has to admit that it is a very confused policy. A bit like a chameleon that has fallen into a bag of Smarties, it is changing almost by the day, by the hour. On the Government side of the House, we are waiting to find out what his party will vote for or against in this Budget, with about two hours to go before the vote.

However, the hon. Gentleman identified a really important point, which I would like to come back to. He spoke about the diverse nature of our individual constituencies—Birmingham, Erdington and mine of Daventry. Maybe, just maybe—this follows points made in speeches from Opposition Members—we are all missing a trick in trying to tackle some of the long-term unemployment problems our country faces.

However, I start by saying that this is a very good Budget. A record number of people are now in work. The pace of net job creation under this Government has been three times faster than in any other recovery on record. Unemployment figures for March show a 20% fall in the claimant count in just one year and the fastest fall in the youth claimant count since 1997. That is something we should all be able to welcome. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecast 1.5 million more jobs over the next five years. Again, that is something we can all welcome. There are a record number of women in work, and for the first time in 35 years we have a higher employment rate than the United States of America.

There are good measures in the Budget for our exporters and good financial support to put them on an even keel with their international competitors. We are lifting people out of paying tax—3 million by 2015. So many of them will be better off by £800 each year because of the changes in the tax system. There are 450,000 fewer workless households, which is surely something to celebrate. It might not be enough, but it is something to be pleased about.

We have a fantastic new policy for pensions. We have introduced the workplace pension, the single-tier pension and now the change in policy for annuities will allow people to help shape their futures as they choose, with their own money. Three quarters of a million more people are in full-time work—that is something to celebrate—and 300,000 more people are in part-time work.

I hope that Opposition Members will stop their attack on part-time work, because it is important for all sorts of sectors in the economy, and indeed all types of people, whether students in the summer or mothers returning to work after having children. Part-time work is fundamentally important in helping to drive our economy.

Like the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington, I am unsure about zero-hours contracts, having heard good and bad stories about them. However, I remind him that he was the head of a trade union that pushed for a European measure that led to less flexibility in our work force here in the United Kingdom. Indeed, a Labour Secretary of State went to the European Parliament to plead for the United Kingdom to be allowed more flexibility. I suggest that the lack of flexibility in our employment market might have led businesses to look around for something that would allow greater flexibility, and that seems to be zero-hours contracts.

[Jack Dromey]

I take it that the hon. Gentleman is referring to the agency workers directive.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

That was one of them, yes.

[Jack Dromey]

Then I plead guilty. I was one of those involved in those discussions, and absolutely rightly so. If there are two people doing the same job alongside each another, one who is an agency worker and one who is directly employed, it is absolutely right that they should be paid at the same rate. To fail to do that divides work forces and, as we have seen in some areas of economy, damages social cohesion.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. He and I have a difference of opinion on the matter, which I would happily talk to him about over one of those beers he used to have too many of. The point I was trying to make is that the lack of flexibility in our employment market might have led employers to try various tactics to reintroduce flexibility by a different route.

Like the hon. Gentleman, I have been talking to my constituents about the Budget over the past few days. Unlike him—I might be wrong about this—I go to a gym, which is a privilege. My doctor told me I should go. In fact, he says that I have the lower limbs of a runner—“athlete’s foot”, as he puts it colloquially. I was talking to a personal trainer at the gym who recognised the importance of lifting the tax threshold and how much it would mean to him. I also met a man there who has three jobs: he is a pest control expert, he sells logs and he is a gritter for my local authority. He recognised the importance of the change in the tax threshold and welcomes any changes that bring about a healthy welfare cap. I also met a neighbour of mine there who is very pleased with the pension changes because they will allow him to plan for his retirement flexibly, and hopefully spend his own money which he has already earned and paid tax on.

The Government have delivered some good thing for my constituency, such as the university technical college and massive investment in the further education sector, which will help with long-term youth unemployment in future. There has been massive investment in the town of Daventry, helped by the council, and massive investment coming into the Daventry international rail freight terminal, where new businesses and logistics are settling. That means that my constituency is remarkably different from Birmingham, Erdington. There are only 1,000 JSA claimants in my constituency—it is still too many—which is down by 30% from last year. That is a claimant rate of 2.1%. For 18 to 24-year-olds, the rate has fallen by almost 30%. The number of people claiming for more than 12 months has also fallen by over 30%.

As the hon. Members for Birmingham, Erdington and for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) and, to a certain extent, the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said, we all have completely different constituencies. Perhaps the one-size-fits-all nature of Government delivery in trying to get people out of long-term unemployment simply will not work. We need a much more flexible solution.

Unlike some Opposition Members, I am quite pleased with the developments in the Work programme. It is a very big programme that has had more than its fair share of teething troubles, but up to December 2013 A4e, one of the two providers in my constituency, has achieved over 100 positive job outcomes in Daventry, which in the majority of cases means someone being supported into a job lasting over six months. On Friday, I went to A4e’s offices and met some of the people who work there helping to get people in my constituency back to work. I met Jodie, Hollie and lots of A4e staff giving their all to try to remedy this problem that we have in all our constituencies. I say to Labour Members that the one-size-fits-all approach does not work all the time. We need flexible solutions, and sometimes private providers are just as good as the public sector in achieving that.